Yellow Jackets' bowl debacle ruins season

They are supposed to reward success, not measure it, serving more as a year-end bonus than a regular work week.

In fact, only a handful of teams significantly alter their identities in their final games each year.

They are the ones that clinch championships. Or those that attain a new level of respect either with a major upset or by snatching an unexpected national ranking.

And then there's any team that does what Georgia Tech did at the Emerald Bowl.

The Yellow Jackets didn't just lose their last game of the season. They gave away a lot of the optimism they were primed to take out of it with an embarrassing effort.

Good teams don't get blown out in bad bowls, which the Jackets did in a 38-10 loss to Utah. True ACC contenders don't get pushed around by a Mountain West opponent, which is what happened when the Utes amassed 550 yards of offense.

And programs on the upswing, as it seemed Tech was before Thursday, don't lay down - even when they would rather be somewhere else. And the Jackets probably should have been after a 7-4 regular season that included wins over Auburn and Miami.

But it's tough to claim you deserved to be in a better bowl after playing as if you were not worthy of the one you were invited to.

Never mind the charges made by Utah players and denied by Tech coach Chan Gailey that the Jackets quit in Thursday's game. To do so they would have had to have started playing at some point, which they never did.

The unemotional performance would have been beneath an average team, let alone one that should now be savoring two benchmark wins and having one of the best defenses in the nation, at least statistically. Instead, Tech's off-season began with the indignity of the school's worst bowl loss ever and the unsettling impact it will have.

That shouldn't be what Tech's season is remembered for. And it won't be.

No team that wins at Auburn and Miami, two of the toughest places to play in college football, makes its legacy on the sloppy turf of a converted baseball field in a half-filled stadium three days before the new year.

But Thursday's loss does diminish a lot of the progress that preceded it on The Flats, if only because it finishes another typically schizophrenic Tech season on the down side.

It also seems to leave several questions hanging in the air that should have been filled with hope now.

Fans have to be wondering whether they should expect a breakout season or another step backward for Reggie Ball next year. The dynamic but inconsistent quarterback will be older as a junior, but nothing he did in the last month suggests he'll be any better.

They should also be trying to figure out how the team could forget about Calvin Johnson, one of the best receivers in the country who caught two passes for less than 20 yards in each of the Jackets' last two games.

And you know there are boosters out there asking how wise it really was to extend Gailey's contract after seeing how poorly he prepared his team for its final game. One bad day doesn't nullify the three years of generally good work Gailey has done. But it does make you wonder if he'll ever have the Jackets playing consistently for an entire season.

Until Thursday, there weren't going to be such heavy issues coming out of a largely successful season for the Jackets, who finished two games out of first place in the ACC's Coastal Division and once again played their best against their toughest opponents.

Things looked fairly promising and it seemed the Jackets were going to have to work pretty hard to mess that up.